Toronto Entrepreneur

If you are a programmer and are or will be buying a new laptop, you’re probably wondering what you should buy. It’s a tough decision because it’s one of those things that if you make a mistake you’re stuck with it for years. Kind of like having an ugly kid. Well not that bad. The good news is that if you really seeking quality in your next laptop, your choices boil down to 2. Do you want an IBM thinkpad (or a Lenovo) or do you want an Apple. Well I’ve had the privilege of being provided with a free laptop through my employers in the past 4.5 years. Yeah working has some perks

5.5 years ago I bought an iBook G3 on eBay and used it for 1 year. That was my first mac and I really enjoyed it. Then I went to IBM and was given a thinkpad T23. I was really excited about the new laptop and enjoyed that one for a year until I realized it was a really ugly, slow machine. Then they changed my thinkpad to a T43, which was a lot faster but it still was ugly and it wasn’t as fast as I wanted it to be. I am not complaining about specs, I mean when I switched applications, my brain had already done the context switch where the machine hadn’t. That makes a computer slow. Then I started working at UofT.

I was given a MacBook pro and I’ve been using that for 1.5 years. It’s absolutely awesome. Here is my comparison between the two machines I’ve used very extensively.

Mac qualities:
- Extremely beautiful and bright screen. You will learn that a bright screen is fundamental in a healthy, developer, machine relationship. Thinkpad’s screen, not so bright.
- Great feel on the keyboard and the nice back-light beneath it. Thinkpad’s keyboard was great and I particularly loved the little knob that acted as the mouse inside the keyboard.
- It’s fast. yeah it’s really fast.
- Great wireless card. Thinkpad’s card was great but the software was freaking dumb in finding available networks.
- The basic softwares come with the OS.
- The speakers suck I admit; but so did the thinkpad’s.
- I used to hate iTunes, but once you find some friends who are mac users, you’ll learn to love iTunes. I have access to about 60 gigs of music on my partner’s macBook every day at work. I’m so glad I convinced him to buy the mac. You have access to all sorts of radio stations and a huge library of podcasts.
- It looks fabulous. Yes aesthetics are very crucial in a longterm relationship.
- The battery is amazing, amazing, amazing.
- You always have access to the terminal (that includes ssh, sftp, grep, ps … and all those useful commands)
- The OS is amazing. I restart the machine once a week.

So overall I think the MacBook pro is the best laptop out there by far. I know it’s slightly expensive but you can get great discounts from the UofT bookstore and you can get them even cheaper if you can buy a used one from one of the profs. Believe me if you use your laptop a lot (I use it 10-12 hours/day) you should buy a MacBook Pro.

One little note for Java developers though. If you are going to compile java 6 code on the machine, make sure you buy a Core 2 duo. The “2″ indicates that the OS is a 64 bit OS and Java 6 only runs on a 64 bit Mac OS. Happy coding.

Rokham Fard